Where Have All the Monsters Gone?

I've spent the past three days trawling the streaming services for good horror movies to watch for Halloween, but no joy. I've seen most of the good ones(I own most of them on DVD, in fact), and all the ones I try turn out to be duds. Especially grating are the purported "documentaries" that claim to be investigating allegedly haunted locations, but usually consist of a merry troupe of dimwits blundering around in the artful darkness and scaring the shit out of themselves with the sound of their own mouth-breathing. No, that's not a ghost, numbfuck; that's you breathing into the microrecorder like the hapless victim of a botched gelding. Who do you think you're fooling?

Any film by Steve Shippy, AKA Prozak, should be avoided at all hazards. Nothing but clanging stingers, overdubs that are meant to be ominous but end up being ridiculous because of the basso profundo tone he affects while reading them, and endless sequences of him swearing that he heard, felt, or saw something for which there is no evidence despite endless slow-mo replays. Even at a brisk runtime of eighty minutes or so, they feel like an eternity, and if you actually make it to the suspiciously out-of-focus and anticlimactic ending, you will feel like a dupe.

If anyone has any recs for decent horror, please toss them my way.

Things were better on the reading front. I finished Blood at the Bookies(Fethering Mystery #9). It was more of the familiar, inoffensive same, though the fact that Carole's knee-jerk, pissy snootiness and habit of leaping to conclusions are never called to account by Jude is growing irksome. I don't expect her to end their friendship(though she would be well within her rights to do so), but it's ludicrous to think that Jude, who has always respected herself and others and lived her life on her own terms, would simply accept Carole's childish behavior and let it pass without an apology. Jude might have died or been kidnapped because Carole chose not to answer the phone, yet the subject is never broached again by either the characters or the plot. Tralala, that's just Carole for you, right ho. Onward. Wouldn't want to inconvenience the plot by having Jude take reasonable offense at her friend's shoddy treatment. Such things happen when tired writers just want to wrap things up.

It's not so much of a problem that I won't read the next one, but it's a niggle that might soon become an interest-killing dealbreaker.